Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move amendment (1) circulated in my name:

(1)    Schedule 1, after item 3, page 3, insert

4 At the end of paragraph 25-1(2)(d):

Add:

“or

             (e)    a four-wheel drive vehicle that is registered in a rural area.”

This amendment to the Tax Laws Amendment (Luxury Car Tax) Bill 2008 is designed to exempt a four-wheel drive vehicle registered in a country area. I raised this issue in the second reading debate, but for the benefit of those who were probably not listening I will reiterate a couple of facts. As I said then, I am delighted to see the Assistant Treasurer in the House today. I have spent some time with him in a four-wheel drive vehicle on some very rough roads in the Pilliga Scrub looking at various things and up in the area of Nowendoc. He would—or should, given his history—fully appreciate the need for four-wheel drive vehicles on some country roads.

I made the point earlier that a four-wheel drive vehicle is not a luxury to those people who are trying to look after their families in areas where roads can be quite trying. Roads can be very rough. There can be wash-outs, water, mud, corrugations and dust. People in country areas do not have the luxuries of public transport, of paved roads, of tollways or of motorways. Many people have to purchase vehicles that will withstand the arduous roads they have to drive them on. Deputy Speaker Scott, who is in the chair at the moment, would be well aware of some of those road circumstances. I appeal to the government to look at what they are doing with what seems to be rushed taxation legislation. If they do not or will not agree with the amendment, I urge them to lift the threshold of $57,000 for those people who require these vehicles because of the circumstances in which they live—that is, in country areas. This is a tax on a necessity, not a luxury, in these areas.

I am sure that many of the people I am talking about would buy a normal vehicle if governments spent more money on the road network. I made the point earlier that government raises about $14 billion in fuel excise—and there has been a major debate on fuel excise in this place—and spends around $2.5 billion to $2.6 billion on roads, so there is an enormous discrepancy between what is raised and what is spent. As I said earlier, country people do not have the luxury of opting for something else. In the last few weeks we have had constant banter about country people having to produce more food for the starving millions of the world, about country people having to do this and that, and here we are taxing the very people that government and others in the public arena are suggesting will be required to do more to help the growing global population.

I ask all members, particularly the Treasurer and the Assistant Treasurer, to look seriously at this amendment. I could understand the tax, as I said earlier, if someone were to buy a four-wheel drive vehicle worth $100,000 or more with leather and every bit of gadgetry in it. But a very basic LandCruiser, for instance, is over $57,000. In fact, the cheapest LandCruiser is a V8 and so we have a contradictory debate where we are sending people towards heavy fuel use rather than more economical use. Diesel is much more efficient in consumption but, if you buy a diesel LandCruiser—and many other four-wheel drive vehicles are the same—it will cost $12,000 to $15,000 more and be considered a luxury. (Time expired)

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the proposed amendment to the Tax Laws Amendment (Luxury Car Tax) Bill 2008 and related bills. The station property I owned for many years was over 350 kilometres from the nearest town of Richmond. My neighbours—Belfield, Esmeralda and Victoria Vale—were all over 300 kilometres from the nearest town. Each of these people had families and each of them had ringers and stockmen, and they needed fairly big cars to be able to travel that distance. That was not a luxury; that was an absolute necessity. If you go to do your shopping and it is a 600-kilometre round trip, you want a fairly decent car to do that in. Whilst I have nothing against the government increasing charges for people who are rich and want to buy very expensive luxury vehicles, I object very strongly when our shearers, for example, are charged. We do a lot of suburban shearing now. The last two shearing teams I was out with were driving an average of 70 kilometres a day. I have 400 or 500 farmers on the southern Atherton Tableland. All are on dirt roads and all of the workers who have to commute are also on dirt roads. What may be a luxury in the city is an absolute necessity for these people. We are not talking about very much money. Surely the government could come to the party.

The cost of petrol for these machines is enormous. We need a cheaper petrol regime. This government now has the ability to deeply embarrass the previous government, which had its chance with ethanol. All it did was tax it at 12c a litre, which country Australia if they have any brains will remember. They will most certainly remember it if this government moves to ethanol. Carbon is such a big issue and is influencing the judgement of the government. We would urge the government to consider that rural Australia has the answers for it with respect to carbon. As I have said before in this place, in An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore’s very first solution to the CO₂ problem was corn ethanol. It provides a 29 per cent reduction in emissions. Sugar, because we do not plant annually, supplies a 196 per cent reduction. So the answers are there. If you want to apply a tax to rural people and if you keep doing this then you will have no rural people. I have said in this place many times before—and I will on all occasions remind the House of this—that our cattle numbers are down about 17 per cent and our sheep numbers are down about 50 per cent. We are closing three sugar mills every four years. I am not an expert in wheat, so I will skip over that one. In manufactured milk we are down about 17 per cent. People say, ‘Oh, that’s the drought.’ Those figures are predrought; those figures are a little bit old. I presume they are a lot worse now. If you are going to close down agriculture and you have no manufacturing, you had better hope mineral prices stay up.

Unlike everybody else in this place, I come from the mining industry. Before I came into this place I worked at the Flora Dora and a number of other mines that I personally developed and owned. I can tell you in mining that what goes up will come down, and when it does it is going to take Australia straight through the floor. We would urge the government to understand that, like every other country on earth, we need a rural sector.

Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Hear, hear!

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Don’t say, ‘Hear, hear!’ Your mob abolished the rural sector. It is not available for you to say, ‘Hear, hear!’ I am sorry. I would love you to back me up. But it is not available to you. It was under your regime that all of these agricultural industries went through the floor. (Time expired)

Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A committee of road safety chaired by the father of the member for Kennedy in the Fraser years looked at the circumstances of driver licensing. The evidence they heard is a matter of record in this parliament. Two engineers in Queensland came before that committee to put the case on economic and social grounds for why bigger vehicles were better than smaller ones, simply on the grounds of road trauma, and they had the statistics to prove it. Those who drove larger vehicles might have used a bit more petrol—and I know there were other implications—but they were safer. Taking that advice, when I bought my younger daughter her first vehicle, I chose a Celica—second hand, admittedly—that would have been classified in the values of that day as a luxury car. In her early driving experience, she was driving along the highway when a truck driver pulled out from a side road in front of her. She had nowhere to go, as there were trees on both sides of the road. She stood on the brakes. The car slid sideways under the bulbar and the windscreen cracked in front of her face. If I had bought her a less substantial vehicle, I would not be celebrating the recent birth of her second child.

That is what we are talking about in country areas. Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, you might remember when—under a program that has also just been chucked out—through your representations I as minister assisted in the funding of some Toyotas to cart kids around part of the remote area of your electorate simply because, and this was the issue, the buses previously funded had fallen to pieces.

It not only applied to a mob of school kids; it applied to the parents that had to drive those kids in other areas to school. The point of safety is fundamental. Personally, when I get the opportunity to select a vehicle to drive, while I no longer need a four-wheel drive in my electorate, I look for horsepower and I look for suspension that guarantees me safety in my job. If I were a member of the CFMEU, the case would be put by my union leader—OH&S. The reality is that you cannot just put a nominal value on a vehicle and say it is luxurious. There is a need—I am not sure exactly where the Volvo field fits into the range of luxury cars, it has varied a little in time, but it has been internationally recognised as a safe car and I will bet you most of them are today considered luxury vehicles. Too bad if they save a few kids’ lives!

We have this mania about tall poppies. Labor is going back to its roots, hating anybody who earns even a bit of money working fly-in fly-out on the mines. If they have that sort of money, they have to be punished. Let me say to you, when we talk about workers’ jobs, the only reason that we can be competitive in the Middle East selling Statesmans and Caprices is the support of the local market. It is very small anyway—I think about 4,000 Statesmans and Caprices a year. The average car manufacturer would not do that; Ford has just walked away from it. Every time you erode the sales of a vehicle of that nature, manufactured in Australia, you undermine their effort to export competitively and those jobs go out the window. But such is the paranoia of this new government in punishing people for buying a vehicle—and by the way, about 70 per cent of those employed in the vehicle industry are employed in marketing and servicing, not in manufacturing. It is the same job for an Aussie if he services a BMW or services any other small vehicle manufactured in Australia. It does not make any difference. (Time expired)

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will speak briefly. Having listened closely to the member for O’Connor, I presume that he was supportive of the amendment. The language was supportive. I will be quite interested to see how he and other country members, who recognise fully the circumstances that our vehicles have to endure on our roads and the safety features that the member for O’Connor raised, will vote on this amendment.

One of the interesting by-products of this debate will be to see where the shadow Treasurer, who is in the chamber at the moment, stands on this issue. He spoke of his great concern, as I have of mine, for those in the bush, as he called them. I hate that term. I live in the country; I do not live in a bush. Other people may refer to them as living in bushes, but they do not; they live in the country. And they have to endure very difficult circumstances in terms of their roads. It is all very well to travel from those glossy shores into the country on little excursions in a nice four-wheel drive, and it may well have all of those luxurious features to it, but most people do not. Most people, as the member for O’Connor said, do not see those vehicles as being luxurious, and to draw a line in dollars that becomes the determination of luxury is quite wrong and the government needs to address that. The Assistant Treasurer is well aware of those circumstances that are out there from his previous life working for the New South Wales roads minister. He knows those circumstances. He should also be well aware of the cost of these vehicles to people. In fact, if they introduce this particular tax, as I said earlier, it will encourage people in the country, for taxation reasons, to move to V8 petrol engines, with all of the emissions and various problems that those engines will have, let alone the consumption of a fossil fuel.

In other places we have a debate going on about carbon and fossil fuels and how we are going to come to grips with climate change. We have these other debates going on as we speak, and here we have, by drawing a line in the sand on the number of dollars, circumstances where we are going to encourage higher fuel use—not lower fuel use, higher fuel use—and where we are going to encourage greater emissions. Not lower emissions, greater emissions. It will be cheaper for those people who do not have the luxury of public transport, paved roads, tollways or motorways, as the member for O’Connor and the member for Kennedy quite rightly said, to do this. It will be cheaper for those people who have to traverse those roads to provide the food for the nation, to provide the food that they are being encouraged to feed others in the world, to do this. They have to travel on roads that are less safe than the majority of roads, and to impose a tax on those people in those circumstances and call it a luxury tax for living there is a major insult to those individuals.

I urge the government—I am pleased the Prime Minister is here at the moment—to review this. Prime Minister, you must review this. This is not fair to those people who do not have a choice. If you are driving a Toorak tractor—or a Bondi one as maybe the shadow Treasurer does—you have a choice of conveyance. You have a choice of conveyance which is quite safe: a bus, a car or a taxi. But in the country, where roads are not as good for a whole range of reasons, people do not have that choice and it is not a luxury to have a four-wheel drive vehicle to keep their family safe. It is not a luxury to have a bullbar on the front of it to avoid a kangaroo or some straying animal coming through the windscreen at you. It should not be, as this legislation imposes, Prime Minister, viewed as a luxury, and I urge the government to review the threshold or exempt four-wheel drive vehicles that are registered in country areas from the legislation.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, in speaking to the amendment, my daughter rolled a car six times at Christmas. It was a small SUV. If she had been driving a big SUV—

Debate interrupted.

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! It being 2 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 97. Further consideration in detail may be resumed at a later hour and the member for Kennedy will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed.